We wanted to add Application Insights to SharePoint, but we couldn’t find any useful documentation online. I started some investigations into how I could do this manually myself. As SharePoint is an ASP.NET application, I started teased apart how Visual Studio adds hooks into projects. I created an empty git repository, created a website, checked it in, used Visual Studio to add App Insights, checked in, then diffed all the changes.

After investigating, we discovered that it was easier than I thought. You can track the browser metrics by simply adding the App Insights JavaScript to the SharePoint master page.

For the server side metrics, as it is an ASP.NET website, you can update the web.config file on the server to start tracking those metrics, we found that the Application Insights Status Monitor configuration tool was the easiest way to get this done.

One of my favourite Azure offerings is Application Insights. I think it is an extremely simple thing that should be added to every website you manage. It is free for basic usage and only takes a couple of minutes to set up.

I’ve been adding App Insights to a number of SSW websites (such as SSW.com.au, SSWTimepro.com and SSWLinkAuditor.com). Since being added, App Insights has been helping us to keep on top of our application metrics and unhandled exceptions.